1) Thanks to Raymond Lackey for providing a concrete example of the cocktail party effect.

2) He queried the economics of the apidictor so lets us do some simple arithmetic.

    In the swarming season you have to examine each colony every 8 days taking, say 15 mins. per hive.
    On average  90% of these indicate that no action is required and 10% show swarm preparations.(If a colony swarms every 2 years and you inspect it 10 times a season, that means swarm preparations are found once every 20 checks so 95% are wasted but I like to be conservative and call it 90%!)

    Thus a commercial beekeeper with 100 hives spends 100 x 15mins = 25 hours every 8 days, inspecting his hives.

    An apidictor check takes less than 30 seconds so this would take him 100 x 0.5 = 50mins.  10 of these would show the need for a full inspection which would take him a further 10 x 15mins. = 2.5hrs.
Total time taken = 3hrs.20 mins saving him 21h.40m. every 8 days.
    Suppose 10 inspections are needed in the season he would save 217 hours.
    Multiply this by the hourly rate for labour in the country where you live and that is the annual saving he would make by using an apidictor.  I think you will conclude that even a fairly expensive instrument would be viable for people with fewer than 100 hives.  The one-man businesses would have time to run more hives and increase their profits.

3)  On my recent posting about the apidictor, you may have received things like 4BD. This is the way the net interprets my signal for a half. In future I'll put 4.5.  In the above, whatever it sends for % means percent.

Rex Boys